Anders Gronstedt Discusses How to Lead Learning Sessions in Virtual Worlds

The other day, I was speaking with virtual world learning expert Anders Gronstedt about teaching in a 3D virtual immersive environment. For those of you who don’t know, Anders Gronstedt ([email protected]) is president of the Gronstedt Group, which custom develops immersive learning programs for Fortune 500 clients, and host of “Train for Success,” a weekly Second Life speaking series that has been ongoing for several years. He has also published articles in Training, the Harvard Business Review and is often a frequent speaker at conferences and expositions.

Anders provided some great insights for anyone who is conducting a class or session in a 3D virtual immersive environment. So here are Anders thoughts on the competencies you need to have to be effective.

Competencies in leading virtual worlds learning programs

Over the course of hosting our weekly Train for Success meetings in Second Life and helping a number of Fortune 500 and leading government clients with everything from executive collaboration sessions to emergency response simulations, we’ve accumulated a number new competencies for virtual worlds learning professionals.

1. Be a guide-on-the-side, not a sage-on-a-stage

Virtual worlds is an empowering medium. Learners can text chat, camera control, talk, walk and fly. You need to get out of your faculty cloak and join the conversation. Trust the learners, some who possess knowledge and expertise that surpasses anything your learning organization can hope to master. Let them teach each other. No one has better credibility than a successful peer. Use the collaborative power of virtual worlds. Use frequent break-out sessions, for instance. They can be organized in seconds, just teleport groups to different areas or erect soundproof walls between break out groups.

2. Give tours, not classes

One of the greatest sins in a virtual world is to put avatars in chairs and start lecturing to PowerPoint slides. You might as well use WebEx. If you insist on using PowerPoint slides, put them next to each other in a poster board session. A walking tour of poster boards will let participants linger on past slides. It gives you something to do with your avatar. And you can check that everyone is following along. Needless to say, a tour along a path with 3-D props is even better than a poster board tour, which brings me to my next competency.

3. Use 3-D props, not 2-D

You’re in a 3-D world, why drag in 2-D props like PowerPoints? Virtual worlds can be used to scale things up and scale things down, walk inside a molecule or on top of a 3-D map. Visualize products in 3-D, take a car for a spin on a track or walk on an oil rig. Or visualize data in 3-D, walk and crawl inside a giant 3-D bar chart; you’ll see patterns in the 3-D data that you never saw in a million 2-D PowerPoint bar charts.

4. Focus on informal learning, not formal

We all know that informal communications accounts for 80-90% of all real learning in any organization. Virtual worlds provides an environment that proximate the informality of a water cooler conversation. Take advantage of it. Schedule informality. Create cool lunges or beach fronts where people can hang out. Schedule breaks and encourage people to come early and stay late for meetings, so they can socialize and learn from each other.

5. Ask for forgiveness, not permission

There are powerful forces at work against the virtual worlds learning revolution. If the bureaucratic class in your company at IT, legal, HR and the training function itself is trying to prevent virtual worlds learning from happening, or dumb it down to a sterile virtual conference room with non-customizable avatars, don’t let that stop you. The new generation workers don’t care what your excuse are, if it’s “IT security” or “cost.” They will ask themselves if you get it or not. Your organizations inability to offer real virtual worlds learning opportunities will be taken as arrogance, technophobia, stupidity, or all of the above. You have to represent this new generation learners. Don’t ask the luddites in IT, legal and HR for permission, ask for forgiveness after the fact.

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